ONLINE DIARY

You Can Be a Bar Code

By Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell

Bar codes are everywhere. While their main function is to encode the value of a product, they also have come to symbolize consumer culture itself. Artists have been using bar codes in their work since their advent in the late 60's, and a growing number of sites play with, comment on and even generate them.
At www.barcodeart.com, Scott Blake, an Omaha artist, creates computerized portraits of celebrities in which each pixel is part of a bar code. The result is a sort of digital pointillism. His portraits play on the (rather well-trodden) idea that the famous have commodified themselves. For instance, his portrayal of Madonna uses bar codes from her CD's and books. He also invites visitors to bar-code themselves by entering personal data like age and weight.
Bar codes particularly appeal to Mr. Blake because he is strictly a computer artist. "In the world, there are infinite gradations of gray, but bar codes are black and white - a stark dichotomy just like the ones and zeroes at the basis of computers," he explained.
His site links to an esoteric subculture of bar-code-inspired sites. One called BardCode (artcontext.org/bardcode) purports to translate the entire works of Shakespeare into a stream of bar codes.
Mr. Blake meticulously ensures that every code he uses is actually scannable. Until he bought his own scanner several months ago, he said, he would take his creations to local stores "and ask the salespeople to run it under their scanners to see if it worked."